Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
In depth analysis of my antonia
In depth analysis of my antonia
My antonia literary analysis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: In depth analysis of my antonia
The Alembic of Art of My Antonia The Alembic of Art is the chapter of My Antonia The Road Home that will be discussed. This chapter suggests that Willa Cather uses references from the arts in creating the novel My Antonia. Much of Willa Cather's background came from her childhood in Nebraska. It even uprooted the character Annie Sadilek, from Red Cloud, a town Cather lived in during her adolescence ("Classic Notes", 1). Despite her background, John J. Murphy believes "My Antonia is a novel in which vision and arrangement create character" (Murphy, 37) and Cather created this by using inspiration from such things as the Bible and paintings. There are many specific and non-specific biblical borrowings and echoes in the novel, My Antonia. One example is when Grandfather Burden reads from the Bible, first from Psalm 47 and then the first two chapters from Matthew, the account of Christ's birth. Then when the Burdens go to the Shimerdas after the suicide "they looked very biblical as they set off" (Cather, 100). The Christmas Story of Matthew and Luke echoes in Widow Steaven's account of the birth of Antonia's child. Also, Jim's goodbye scene with Antonia, illuminated by the sun and moon, reflects Revelation 12:1. "Cather's biblical subtext is an unusual one for an American western in that it incorporates Antonia's Catholic tradition and Jim's Protestant one to make events notable" (Murphy, 40). Murphy also suggests that Cather was influenced by paintings that she saw while visiting Barbizon in 1902. Many of the paintings Cather saw were reminiscences of Nebraska in the primitive huts of mud and stone, wheat fields, and peasant women. Cather associates Antonia with the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet. These paintings often contained "women who looked old and battered, who were bent and slow and not food for much else. Such brave old faces as most of these field-working women have, such blithe songs they hum, and such good-humored remarks they bawl at a girl who sees too much of one particular reaper. There is something worth thinking about in these brown, merry old women, who have brought up fourteen children and can outstrip their own sons and grandsons in the harvest field, lay down their rake and write a traveler directions as to how he can reach the next town in a hand as neat as a bookkeeper's. As the sun dropped lower, the merriment ceased, the women were tired and grew to look more and more as Millet painted them, warped and bowed and heavy" (Murphy 45). Millet certainly contributes to Jim's view of Antonia during several scenes in the novel. At first he says, " her eyes are big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich dark color. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking" (Cather, 23). Millet's influence is also strong later in the novel when Jim describes Antonia as, " a battered woman now but she still had something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by the look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last" (353). These paintings Cather saw obviously set her mind to the way women were and obviously had a great impact on her. Reading the critical analysis gave me a new perspective on My Antonia. I always enjoy seeing how others interpret literature, and John J. Murphy's interpretation was very enlightening. I could see some of the biblical references while reading the novel, but I never would have know about the influence from Millet's paintings. Knowing all this extra information makes the novel so much more interesting to me.
"The roof was caving in and I thought I was going to die. It was like
Randall III, John H. "Intrepretation of My Antonia." Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James Schroeter. New York: Cornell University Press, 1967. 272-323.
He is apprehensive about seeing Antonia, fearing that she will no longer be the idealized person who exists in his memory. Jim is not let down when they meet, as even though she is now a “battered woman … but she still had that something that fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment” (226). Age has not dampened the spirit that Jim was drawn to throughout his youth and now his adulthood. He speaks about her through a lens of true love and respect, telling her children that he “couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate [towards Antonia] … I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her” (222). Jim refers to Antonia as a “rich mine of life,” and it is clear that Antonia’s type of richness is more valuable in Jim’s eyes. Through her, he is able to realize that tangible fiscal wealth is far less precious than the impalpable beauty of emotional connection and
2. How is the following and accurate depiction of Antonia? How are the enumerated traits revealed throughout the story?
What is a black hole? A black hole is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area. Think of it this way: imagine our sun compacted into Austin, Texas. Phenomenal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space.
In Willa Cather’s My Antonia, immigrants face conflict with their respective communities. The difference between values and norms of the immigrants and society are highly emphasized throughout the novel. In My Antonia, Antonia and Lena suffer the most hardships amongst immigrants because they are judged harshly for their actions. The novel focuses on three immigrant teens: Jim, Antonia and Lena. Cather establishes reverse gender roles within the novel. Jim has the privilege of getting an education and never having to work due to having successful grandparents. In contrast, Lena and Antonia come from poor families in which they must perform physical labor and take care of their families, typically the norms of men. Although Lena is confronted with reverse gender roles and disapproval by her community, she eventually finds
Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia is often celebrated for its complimentary depiction of the immigrants that flocked to America at the turn of the twentieth century and hailed for its progressive approach to the ever-relevant immigrant debate. Despite the novel’s superficial benevolence towards foreigners, Janis Stout questions the authenticity of the book’s (and, by extension, Cather’s) kindnesses in her critical article “Coming to America/Escaping to Europe.” Stout argues that Cather’s ethnic characters (or lack thereof) reflect the popular, discriminatory views of her time, and extracts evidence from both the novel and the author’s personal life to buttress this claim. Stout’s criticism inspired my own interpretation-- that Cather’s treatment
My Antonia, by Willa Cather, is a novel about Jim Burden and his relationship and experiences growing up with Antonia Shimerda in Nebraska. Throughout the book Jim reflects on his memories of Nebraska and the Shimerda family, often times in a sad and depressing tone. One of the main ways Cather is able to provoke these sad emotions within the reader is through the suicide of Antonia’s father, Mr. Shimerda. His death was unexpected by everyone and it is thought that homesickness is what drove him to take his own life. Homesickness was surely felt by Mr. Shimerda, as it was by many, but it was the failure to adequately find a way to provide for his family that sent Mr. Shimerda into a depressing downward spiral that left him no foreseeable alternative but to take his own life.
My Antonia, Jim's nostalgia for the past is represented by nature, symbolic elements, and above all Antonia. The Nebraskan prairies are beautiful and picturesque and set the scene for a memorable story. Big farm houses and windmills placed throughout the graceful flowing golden yellow grass become a nostalgic aspect of Jim as he leaves his childhood life behind. The frontier includes destructive and depressing winters and luscious summers that
Basically a wormhole is an approach to time travel, involving black holes. The equations of relativity suggest that pairs of black holes may be connected by “tunnels” that make a short cut through space-time. These tunnels are known as wormholes. It is postulated that for all forces, there is an equal, yet opposite force. So, a black hole’s equal but opposite force would be a white hole. White holes expel light and matter, rather than pulling it in. A wormhole is the connection between a black hole and a white hole.
The name “black hole” created by John Wheeler in the 1960’s was to, “describe what happens when matter is piled into an infinitely dense point in space-time” (Minkel) The overwhelming pull of gravity can repel to matter, by collapsing in on itself. There will then lead to a point of no return to the black hole, which is the most feared object in the universe.
According to the general relativity theory, a sufficiently compact mass has the capacity to deform spacetime thereby forming what is commonly known as a black hole, a point around which the gravitational force is too strong. Imagine a giant building, a skyscraper for example, being compacted and compressed to the size of a Rubik’s cube. This happens to the massive dying star at the end of its life.
...e could start accreting matter and eventually grow into a supermassive one. A third possibility is that supermassive black holes grow from a cluster of smaller black holes that merge."(Bell, Trudy E.) "The bigger the galaxy, it seems, the bigger the black hole."(Dunn, Marcia)
It is not understood well, but in some supernovae the gravity is so intense within the red supergiant that the electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei where they combine with protons to form neutrons. The electromagnetic forces keeping apart the seperate nuclei are gone and the entire core becomes a dense ball of neutrons or an atomic nucleus about the size of Manhatten called a Neutron Star. If the mass is great enough though, when the star turns into a red supergiant it will collapse under its on gravity into a radius smaller than the Schwarzchild Radius and turn into a Black Hole.
A Black Hole is a compact/ localised region of space surrounding a collapsed mass within which gravity is so powerful that neither matter nor radiation can escape – in other words, the escape velocity (see page 3) exceeds the velocity of light.